I've been having problems recently with my site and Google. There have been a number of problems (robots.txt etc.) which I fixed and resubmitted my main page & related pages via WMT. that worked fine.
But since then (2 days ago) I've lost most of the links to my site!
We have a major affiliate that had a lot of links to our site and now they don't appear in
WMT "Links to your site".
We haven't received a warning mail about "unnatural links"
the links from the other site are alive (most of them to our home page, is that a problem)
Any ideas on how to fix this or what's causing it?
It's one of two things:
You haven't fixed your indexing/exclusion problems correctly and something is causing that problem. Check again.
If not, remember that Google changes which links it displays and which it does not display basically according to their whim and updates. It's worth remembering the following things:
Just because a link is reported in WMT does not mean it is a good link.
Just because a link is NOT reported in WMT does not mean it is a bad link.
Overall number of links can only be used as a trend. The appearance or disappearance of a site reporting links means very little in the grand scheme of things.
Affiliate links are generally not a Google favourite for passing value. It's possible that your affiliate got hammered by Google.
Have your traffic and positions been affected? Then you're looking at a more major issue. If not, it's just Google being Google.
Related
I am currently running a website where I promote different coffees from pubs in my city. On my website I have links to the different coffees.
I have recently seen some of this links being shared on Facebook and other social networks.
So I was wondering if it is somehow possible to track how often one of this links are being clicked?
I have tried using redirects to my site but Facebook uses my pictures in the previews, whereas I don't want this because it is misleading.
I have seen that this works with Bitly so it must somehow be possible?
And there are of course different services providing this, but it would be nice if it would run without any foreign services.
So basically I am looking for a solution which will let me know how often a link, origination from my site was clicked in Facebook, Google+ or any other forum.
There definitely is. Try looking into Google Analytics, it will show you show much data from your personal websites and links that it can blow your mind! Here is the link
Google Analytics helps you analyze visitor traffic and paint a
complete picture of your audience and their needs. Track the routes
people take to reach you and the devices they use to get there with
reporting tools like Traffic Sources. Learn what people are looking
for and what they like with In-Page Analytics. Then tailor your
marketing and site content for maximum impact.
You can even get a free package to use!
Hope this helps!
Yes you have plenty of analytical options.
Something as straight forward as Google Analytics for example.
If you are using cpanel on your hosts server, you even have options such as AWSTATS, which will also provide information.
If all else fails you can even use post data stored in your apache / nginx logs.
Since you have amended your question you might want to check out this tool. It is not google. :)
It is called Click Meter and performs Link Tracking and provides click reports, etc
I was wondering what's Google's official policy on linking my own websites together, do they forbid it, allow it, allow it as long as it's no-follow, etc.
For clarification i will give both a white-hat and black-hat examples:
white-hat:
I'm a web designer who also has several affiliate websites. I designed those websites so i would like to give myself credit by linking from the affiliate website to my professional bio website where people can hire me as a designer.
black-hat:
I buy 100 different domains and link each one to the other 99 sharing all the link juice between them. The content of each website abide by Google's policy and isn't spammy , the only thing that's wrong is the fact that i got 99 links to each of them and i'm the only one doing the linking.
First solution - nofollow:
Well, if they are nofollow, I don't see why Google would care.
So, you'd probably be safe with that, if what you want to achieve is indeed giving yourself credit.
But, as for SEO optimization, as you already know, the sites wouldn't benefit much.
However with nofollow, even if you didn't increase pagerank, number of visits to each site should increase (the traffic from your other sites). This also could be beneficial.
Second solution - portfolio site:
There is one scenario which could suit your purpose:
Create your "portfolio". A site with links to all the sites you created, as an example of your skills and stuff..
Place a link on each of your sites to this portfolio.
Now, you have a page with 100 outbound links, each perfectly legitimate. And each of your sites contains just one outbound link connecting it to your other sites.
This should be fine both for your presentation and for SEO, and you avoided having a link farm.
EDIT: You can find actual info from Google here: http://www.google.com/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf
What are other ways of making your website searchable by Google, other than submitting the link directly to Google.
Submitting links to yahoo is a breeze, gets crawled for a day or two... Google though takes a while...
Thanks...
if you add a link to your website on a website that's already indexed by google, google will follow that and reach your site without you needing to submit to their page. it's actually not recommended to submit your site to their page because then you're put at the end of the queue. but if you have a link on a page that google indexes in the next minute, it will get to you much faster. more links on many pages with higher ranking the better. cheers
Add your site to DMOZ.org, and encourage everyone you know to link to your site. The more places that link to your site, the more likely it'll get indexed sooner (and more fully), and the better it will rank.
Also, if your site is very large, it is not unreasonable to sign up for their webmaster tools and submit a sitemap index. This is especially effective for fast ranking, and showing up in obscure search results, but it will not help you rank for difficult terms.
Also note that if your site was visited by googlebot,
it doesn't necessarily end up in the google index.
Use this link to check:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/sitestatus
I have a site which has been developed completely in flash. Now the site owners do not want to shift to a more text/html based site. So am planning to create an alternative html/text based site which the googlebot will get redirected to. (By checking the useragent). My question is that is this allowed officially by google?
If not then how come there are many subscription based sites which display a different set of data to google compared to the users? Is that allowed?
Thank you very much.
I've dealt with this exact scenario for a large ecommerce site and Google essentially ignored the site. Google considers it cloaking and addresses it directly here and says:
Cloaking refers to the practice of presenting different content or URLs to users and search engines. Serving up different results based on user agent may cause your site to be perceived as deceptive and removed from the Google index.
Instead, create an ADA compliant version of the website so that users with screen readers and vision aids can use your web site. As long as there as link from your home page to your ADA compliant pages, Google will index them.
The official advice seems to be: offer a visible link to a non-flash version of the site. Fooling the googlebot is a surefire way to get in trouble. And remember, Google results will link to the matching page! Do not make useless results.
Google already indexes flash content so my suggestion would be to check how your site is being indexed. Maybe you don't have to do anything.
I don't think showing an alternate version of the site is good from a Google perspective.
If you serve up your page with the exact same address, then you're probably fine. For example, if you show 'http://www.somesite.com/' but direct googlebot to 'http://www.somesite.com/alt.htm', then Google might direct search users to alt.htm. You don't want that, right?
This is called cloaking. I'm not sure what the effects of it are but it is certainly not whitehat. I am pretty sure Google is working on a way to crawl flash now so it might not even be a concern.
I'm assuming you're not really doing a redirect but instead a PHP import or something similar so it shows up as the same page. If you're actually redirecting then it's just going to index the other page like normal.
Some sites offer a different level of content -- they LIMIT the content, they don't offer alternative and additional content. This is done so it doesn't index unrelated things generally.
Are all these types of sites just illegally scraping Google or another search engine?
As far as I can tell ther is no 'legal' way to get this data for a commercial site.. The Yahoo! api ( http://developer.yahoo.com/search/siteexplorer/V1/inlinkData.html ) is only for noncommercial use, Yahoo! Boss does not allow automated queries etc.
Any ideas?
For example, if you wanted to find all the links to Google's homepage, search for
link:http://www.google.com
So if you want to find all the inbound links, you can simply traverse your website's tree, and for each item it finds, build a URL. Then query Google for:
link:URL
And you'll get a collection of all the links that Google has from other websites into your website.
As for the legality of such harvesting, I'm sure it's not-exactly-legal to make a profit from it, but that's never stopped anyone before, has it?
(So I wouldn't bother wondering whether they did it or not. Just assume they do.)
I don't know what hubspot do, but, if you wanted to find out what sites link to your site, and you don't have the hardware to crawl the web, one thing you can do is monitor the HTTP_REFERER of visitors to your site. This is, for example, how Google Analytics (as far as I know) can tell you where your visitors are arriving from. This is not 100% reliable as not all browsers set it, particularly in "Privacy Mode", but you only need one visitor per link to know that it exists!
This is ofter accomplished by embedding a script into each of your webpages (often in a common header or footer). For example, if you examine the source for the page you are currently reading you will find (right down at the bottom) a script that reports back to Google information about your visit.
Now this won't tell you if there are links out there that no one has ever used to get to your site, but let's face it, they are a lot less interesting than the ones people actually use.